What word do we look into to understand what the people in Israel and Judah were thinking? Is it sheol or hades? When we look into hades we're going to get a bunch of Greek mythology. Hades is simply the best Greek word they could find to replace sheol as a place where dead people go. Then there's "gehenna" in Greek, which is a construction based on the Valley of Ben Hinnom in Hebrew. I would assume this word doesn't have any real meaning or background in Greek and is simply Greek-speakers conveying a Hebrew idea. It's used by Jesus 7 unique times in Mathew with repeats in Mark and Luke. Jesus was speaking to people in Israel/Judah where they'd understand what this was. James says "set on fire by gehenna" in a letter written to believers in Jerusalem. Outside of this, nobody uses the term, and it's likely Paul is avoiding it because gentiles don't have any concept of what it's referring to.
We look into the Hebrew. I didn't say that the Greek was everything. I said that Greek was more important, over all, than the Hebrew.
Without the Greek New Testament, it's going to be hard to figure out what's going on. There are terms, though, where the Greek words are just Greek counterparts for Hebrew words that house the original culture and concept.
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